Jeff Bridgforth :: Webcraftsman

More Reflections from Refresh06

November 16, 2006

Design (Web) · Random

I real­ized after I posted my entry last night that I did not dis­cuss what I took away from Andy Budd’s sem­i­nar on CSS Mas­tery.

He encour­aged us to be proud of our work and the choices that we make and not to worry about what oth­ers have to say. He made this com­ment in the con­text of talk­ing about real world markup. The real­ity is that there are a lot of dif­fer­ent tech­niques and strate­gies as we do a CSS design. I came away feel­ing a bit more con­fi­dence as a CSS designer.

He men­tioned Micro­for­mats. I do not know any­thing about them and I am look­ing for­ward to hear­ing Jeremy Keith dis­cuss them on Fri­day. Andy was excited about them and sug­gested them as a tool.

I ben­e­fit­ted from hear­ing Andy’s best prac­tices. It made me aware that I had taken that advice away from his book when I read it last May. I have imple­mented some of his advice, par­tic­u­larly his advice about orga­niz­ing and com­ment­ing on our style sheets. It has been help­ful on a cou­ple of designs I have done recently.

I enjoyed hear­ing about posi­tion­ing and floats. It was a good refresher from what I read in his book and I learned some more to add to my knowledge.

I want to explore more in the area of the image tech­niques he dis­cussed. I have not had a chance to work through that sec­tion of the book or try some of the tech­niques he writes about. I was unaware that CSS Opac­ity is pretty well sup­ported so I might play around with that in the future.

I also enjoyed his dis­cus­sion on bugs and bug fix­ing. He pointed out that most of the prob­lems are not with the browser but with the tech­niques we use or an incom­plete under­stand­ing of the spec­i­fi­ca­tions. I have found this to be true. I appre­ci­ated his advice to keep things sim­ple and that can avoid a lot of the prob­lems. He also sug­gested to try other meth­ods instead of spend­ing a lot of time try­ing to fix some­thing that is not work­ing. I know I ended up doing that with a CSS Reboot design this sum­mer. One way was not work­ing so I came at it a dif­fer­ent way and came up with a solution.

I am look­ing for­ward to today’s sessions:

• Prag­matic Web Design
• How to Be a Web Design Superhero
• It’s More Than Markup
• Cre­at­ing Acces­si­ble DHTML
• Improv­ing Front End Architecture

[tags]refresh06, refresh orlando, Andy Budd, Jeremy Keith[/tags]